Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/03 – Apple Silicon Coming To MacBook Pros Already?

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

So, that November 10th Apple event might see a full slate of Mac laptops with Apple Silicon inside. Why has Ant Group’s IPOs been called off? Why has Walmart called off plans to allow robots to roam its store aisles? And someone explain to me why Spotify’s proposed new algorithm changes aren’t a modern form of Payola? Sponsors: Cava.me/ride CuriosityStream.com/ride promocode: ride Links: Apple to Launch MacBooks With Own Chips Next Week (Bloomberg) China Halts Ant Group’s Blockbuster I.P.O. (NYTimes) China Halts Ant’s Record IPO, Throwing Ma’s Empire Into Turmoil (Bloomberg) AWS launches its next-gen GPU instances (TechCrunch) Walmart Scraps Plan to Have Robots Scan Shelves (WSJ) NASA objects to new mega-constellation, citing risk of “catastrophic collision” (ArsTechnica) Spotify will now allow artists and labels to promote tracks in your recommendations (TechCrunch) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme Right Home for Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. So that November 10th Apple event might see a full slate of Mac laptops with Apple Silicon

inside them. Why has Ant Group's IPO been called off? Why has Walmart called off plans to allow robots to roam its store aisles? And someone explained to me why Spotify's proposed new algorithm changes aren't a modern form of Paola. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. sources are telling Mark German and Debbie Wu that production has ramped up for new 13 and 16-inch MacBook Pros, as well as new 13-inch MacBook Airs, all of which will sport new Apple Silicon chips inside them. But they'll also not be getting any major design changes. These are the

computers that we are expecting to be announced at that recently announced November 10th Apple event. Quote, Apple and overseas suppliers are ramping up production of three Mac laptops, with Apple processors, new 13-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros and a new 13-inch MacBook Air, according to people familiar with the matter. Foxcon is assembling the two smaller laptops, while Quanta Computer is building the larger MacBook Pro. The smaller models are further ahead in production, and at least those two laptops will be shown at next week's event.

Beyond the processor switch, the devices won't have significant design changes. The first Mac processors from Apple will be based on the A-14 chip found in the processor. in the latest iPhones and iPad Air, and tests inside Apple indicate improved power efficiency over the Intel parts they are replacing. The new machines will also have Apple design graphics and machine learning processors. Apple engineers are also currently developing a new Mac Pro that looks like the current design at about half the size. It's unclear if that Mac will replace the current Mac Pro or if it's an additional model.

Apple's chip designs could help the company reduce the size of its computers due to increase power efficiency, but the current Mac Pro is large in part to fit components like additional storage drives and graphics chips, end quote. Yeah, if Apple is already putting their silicon into MacBook Pros, that certainly indicates a high level of confidence on their part that these chips can perform as good or better than anything else out there. But at the same time, if there's no design changes to these laptops, not to be a Debbie Downer here, but what are you actually getting? You're getting basically the exactly. You're getting basically the exact same computer you can get now, but with a ton of app compatibility issues because of the

non-X-86 chips. So who's going to want to buy that? But German does say that Apple is not going to eliminate the Intel versions of their laptops anytime soon. So I guess this is just very much an early adopter announcement. This is odd. Ant Group's IPO, remember that two-part IPO that together would have made for the biggest IPO in history. That IPO has been suspended in both Shanghai and Hong Kong after regulators summoned Jack Ma and other aunt executives to, well, we're not quite sure what kind of sit-down this was, quoting the New York Times. In a notice to Ant posted online late Tuesday, the Stock Exchange said that the company's proposed offering may not meet the conditions for listing after Chinese regulators summoned company executives, including Jack Ma, the Alibaba co-founder who is also Ant's controlling shareholder, for a meeting on Monday. Neither the regulators nor Ant have said in detail what was discussed at the meeting. But the timing of the rendezvous, coming just days before Ant shares were expected to begin

trading concurrently in Shanghai and Hong Kong, suggested discord with the company or with Mr. Ma. Shortly after the Shanghai Exchange made the announcement, Ant said it was suspending the Hong Kong leg of its listing as well. Ant did not immediately have further comment. Over the past decade, Ant has transformed the way people in China interact with money. The company's AlliePay app has become an everyday payment tool for hundreds of millions of smartphone users, as well as a platform for obtaining small loans and buying insurance and investment products. But in the process, Ant has challenged the dominance of China's state-run banks and other institutions, which have long enjoyed a privileged place in the country's financial and political system.

Regulators have looked warily upon Ant's fast growth in certain areas, fearful it might become too big to rescue in the event of a meltdown. Ant has pivoted in response instead of primarily using its own money to extend loans. The company now effectively acts as an agent for banks, introducing them to individual borrowers and small businesses that they might not otherwise reach, end quote. Yeah, but maybe they're doing that too successfully. I don't know enough about this to read any tea leaves, but I will quote this from Bloomberg. Ant has faced scrutiny in Chinese state media in recent days after Ma criticized local and global

regulators for stifling innovation and not paying sufficient heed to development and opportunities for the young. At a Shanghai conference late last month, he compared the Basel Accords, which set out capital requirements for banks, to a club for the elderly, end quote. AWS has introduced new GPU-equipped P-4 instances powered by Intel Cascade Lake processors and NVIDIA's A-100 TensorFlowCensor GPUs, which combined seemed to offer two and a half times the deep learning performance of the previous generation, meaning if you trained a model on this new generation, it should be about 60% cheaper with these new instances, quoting TechCrunch. For now, there is only one size available, the P4D.12x large instance in AWS slang, and the 8A100 GPUs are connected over

NVIDIA's NVLink communication interface and offer support for the company's GPU direct interface as well. With 320 gigabytes of high bandwidth GPU memory and 400 GbPS networking, this is obviously a very powerful machine. Add to that, the 96 CPU cores, 1.1 terabytes of system memory and 8 terabytes of SSD storage, and it's maybe no surprise that the on-demand price is $32.77 per hour, though that price does go down to less than $20 an hour for one-year reserved instances, and $11.57 for three-year reserved instances. On the extreme end, you can combine 4,000 or more GPUs into an EC2 Ultra Cluster, as AWS calls those machines, for high-performance computing workloads

at what is essentially a supercomputer-scale machine. Given the price, you're not likely to spin up one of these clusters to train your model for your toy app anytime soon, but AWS has already been working with a number of enterprise customers to test these instances and clusters, including Toyota Research Institute, GE Healthcare, and Aeon, end quote. Interesting news running counter to a lot of recent prevailing trends here. Walmart has said it will end its plans to use Bossa Nova robots to roam its store aisles, scanning shelves, after concerns about shoppers' reactions to seeing robots roaming down the aisles.

and it didn't help that apparently the bots did not perform that much better than actual human workers, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The retail giant has ended its contract with Robotics Company Basanova Robotics, with which it joined over the past five years to gradually add six-foot-tall inventory scanning machines to stores. Walmart had made the robots a frequent topic of conversation at media and investor events in recent years, hoping the technology could help reduce labor costs and increase sales by making sure products are kept in stock. Walmart ended the partnership because it found different, sometimes simpler solutions that proved just as useful, said people familiar with the situation. As more shoppers flocked to online delivery and pickup because of COVID-19 concerns,

Walmart has more workers walking the aisles frequently to collect online orders, gleaning new data on inventory problems, said some of these people. The retailer is pursuing ways to use these workers to monitor product amounts and locations as well as other automation technology, according to the people familiar with the situation. In addition, Walmart U.S. chief executive John Ferner has concerns about how shoppers react to seeing a robot working in a store, said one of these people. Walmart said in January that the Bossa Nova robots would be in around 1,000 of its 4,700 U.S. stores. Over the past two years, the retailer has said it would bring more automation to stores, characterizing the machines as robot sidekicks for store workers akin to R2D2 from the Star Wars movies.

The Bossa Nova robots were in about 500 stores when the partnership ended, said a Walmart spokes. spokeswoman. Bossa Nova laid off about 50% of its staff after the contract with Walmart ended, according to a person familiar with the situation, who said the robotics firm is pivoting towards new clients and software ventures. The venture capital-backed company was spun out from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in 2005. Walmart told Bossaova, quote, we see an improvement in stores with the robots, but we don't see enough of an improvement in revenue and other metrics, said this person, end quote. Also, a lot of you tend to tweet. at me after I do stories about companies launching thousands of satellites into space.

You tweet at me, isn't that going to create the sort of sphere of junk around planet Earth that is often a joke in sci-fi? Well, NASA is apparently objecting to a new mega constellation of satellites because it says this particular cloud has an unusually high risk of causing orbital collisions, quoting Ars Technica. NASA has formally commented on a request by a U.S. company to build a mega constellation of satellites at an altitude of 720 kilometers above the Earth's surface, citing concerns about collisions. This appears to be the first time that NASA has publicly commented on such an application for market access, which is pending before the Federal Communications Commission. At issue, our plans put forth by AST and Science, which intends to build a constellation of

more than 240 large satellites essentially deploying cell towers in space to provide 4G and possibly 5G broadband connections directly to cell phones on Earth. The company, based in Midland, Texas, calls its constellation Space Mobile and has raised an estimated $120 million. The space agency felt compelled to comment on AST's proposal for several reasons. Most notably, the proposed altitude for the space mobile constellation lies near the A-Train, a group of 10 Earth science monitoring satellites operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, as well as partners in France and Japan. quote, historical experience with the A-Train constellation has shown that this particular region of space tends to produce a large number of conjunctions between space objects, the NASA letter states.

These satellites are also very large. In order to provide service, AST plans to build spacecraft with large phased array antenna, 900 square meters. According to NASA, in planning for potential conjunctions with other satellites and debris in this orbit, this would require prescribing a hard-body radius of 30 meters or as much as 10 times larger than other satellites. Maneuvering around the proposed space mobile constellation would be extraordinarily taxing, NASA said. Quote, for the completed constellation of 243 satellites, one can expect 1,500 mitigation actions

per year and perhaps 15,000 planning activities, the space agency stated. This would equate to four maneuvers and 40 active planning activities on any given day, end quote. Finally, the space agency is concerned because ASD has never built a satellite remotely close in size to the one-ton or larger vehicles that will populate its constellation. Given this lack of experience, it is expected that 10% or more of the satellites may fail, making them unable to maneuver or avoid collisions. NASA found the risk of a catastrophic collision to be, quote,

unacceptably high, end quote. NASA submitted its comments on October 30th, and the comment period closed Monday. Most of the other comments on the AST application were supportive. In response to a query from ours about NASA's submission, AST said it would work with NASA to ameliorate its concerns, end quote. And finally today, is Spotify going to ruin music? I maybe am not being facetious when I say that. Spotify says it is testing a new service that lets artists and labels promote their tracks

in users' recommendations in exchange for receiving a lower royalty rate. So anyone remember Payola? Or as Hamza Shaban tweeted, quote, a massive technology company is exerting its market power by changing algorithms and pricing. Spotify will offer artists and labels an algorithmic boost in exchange for a lowered, quote, promotional recording royalty rate, end quote. Quoting TechCrunch. While the new service is not a paid promotion and requires no upfront budget on artists or labels

part, Spotify says that the artists, labels, and rights holders will agree to be paid a, quote, promotional recording royalty rate for streams where the company provides the service. Streams that come from any other place in the app would not be impacted, however. At launch, the promotional rate will apply only in select areas of Spotify's app, including Spotify Radio and AutoPlay. Promoted tracks won't appear on other playlists, either algorithmic or editorial, though Spotify isn't ruling out expansion to these areas in the future. The idea is that if a track does well due to the promotion, the rights holders would see an overall positive ROI as the music becomes more popular and sees increased plays outside

of the areas where the lower promotional rate applies. Artists can also turn off the promotion at any time if the tool is not having a positive financial benefit. Spotify isn't detailing the extent of the royalty rate change for promotions, saying it may be adjusted as a result of the test. The company also stresses it will take listener interest and enjoyment into consideration with this change. Spotify says if the music performs well, it will continue to promote it, but if it doesn't, it will be pulled back. Quote, we won't guarantee placement to labels or artists, and we only ever recommend music we think listeners will want to hear Spotify notes in its public announcement, end quote. As Gene Chorba of Riot Games tweeted, quote, so Spotify is going to prioritize music from artists that are

willing to take a lower royalty rate. How is this not pay for exposure? They are making modifications to their discovery algorithm in exchange for money. In 1960, the U.S. government outlawed payola. Through that ruling, record companies are not allowed to pay radio stations for more plays slash coverage. Is Spotify not considered a radio station, end quote? Well, I mean, technically, it's not. Radio airwaves are, of course, part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so technically owned by the United States and its citizens, and thus regulated by the FCC. In fact, that's why the FCC even exists. But Spotify is a software platform of its own devising. It is not using any publicly owned airspace or anything else. I'm not saying that a similar law couldn't be put on the

books now to cover the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, but I really don't think that technically the Paola laws apply here, though clearly Spotify is tiptoeing very carefully to act like they also don't believe the law applies. By the way, since I closed yesterday with sort of my gaming report to you, does anyone know the situation with PlayStation 5 orders? I said before that I missed the window that first day of pre-orders, and every time since then I check back on Amazon, it's not even listed. So HiveMind, let me know. Is there some other route I could take to get my hands on a PS5,

or should I just assume I can't even try until, like, March or something like that? Let me know. Talk to you tomorrow.